Smallbrain Solutions

I was reading the draft of Sea Change Strategies’ latest paper, “A Procrastinator’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising” and was inspired to try something that I haven’t done in ages, which is fire up a test paid search campaign. The twist this time was that I have never tried it for fundraising before. Only lead-generation for when I was freelancing back in the day and more recently to promote petition campaigns. Since we are kicking it year-end style, like most every other non-profit, it seemed like a great chance to see if we are leaving any money on the table.

I talked to our Director of Online Fundraising and got $500 bucks and a week and a half. I promptly squandered three or four days over the holidays and kicked it off in earnest today from Chicago O’Hare (since my flight was crazy delayed). Anyhoo, more specifics later, but it is up and running and we are getting click-throughs (no donations yet).

More to come.

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While I can understand that folks in our community may not be thrilled with Capitol Advantage’s new “birthday email/fax for Members of Congress” feature (Judy Sohn says it best) and I tend to agree, my contrary nature requires me to emerge from my perpetual blog-bernation to say this:

Yes, the volume of email that gets (fine, I will say it) spammed to the Hill makes it more difficult for us to get our jobs done. However, it really isn’t the vendor’s fault. It is ours. I am not a client of theirs, we use GetActive, but are they any or less to blame than Kintera, Convio, or DIA? We are the ones that (please excuse the reference) pull the trigger. We are the ones who need to take responsibility and hold back now and again so that our friends on the Hill can learn about other crucial things like where to get the best natural viagra. Believe me, the forms they are using now on the hill are a much bigger problem - and that has more to do with SPAM than advocacy messages. Either way, while I appreciate that the big vendors are trying to work proactively to solve the problem, you didn’t see any of them turning off their “send an email to your member of congress” tools, did you? Do any of them recommend to their clients that they decrease the volume of email to the hill? Not that I have heard. We need to police ourselves - and each other.

If anything, I was much more freaked out about the Capitol Advantage emails I was getting begging me to buy email lists of voters… Just sayin’.

Via [Jason Z. at Democracy in Action]

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